Tuesday, September 6

I thought it would be good to address a certain worry I kept seeing on forums and comment sections while digging for information for yesterday's Elm Street Blu-ray Collection update. Specifically Warner's plan of pairing the six sequels onto three double feature Blu-rays.

First off, there's been complaints about these not being individual releases, demands for a set, and claims Warner has no respect for the series because of these budget double features. Or that the cover pictured depicts Dream Master Freddy and a house completely unrelated to the series. A few are even going as far as to proclaim they're not buying these releases until the studio issues them to their liking.

I'm sorry, but as Nancy once said, screw your pass! Judging by the Freddy's Revenge/Dream Warriorsback cover and the rumored extras rundown of the set, Warner seems perfectly intent on carrying over all the extras of New Line's DVDs along with the added advantage of 1080p resolution and lossless DTS-HD Master Audio tracks. Sure, it would be nice to see re-vamped SEs, but I'm not complaining at the $15-20 price point. All the while Jason, Michael, Pinhead, Leatherface, and Chucky still languish in half-hearted Blu-ray purgatory. Some much worse off than others.

But then I hear crying over potentially shitty picture quality over placing two films onto a single Blu-ray. Though if Warner/New Line's already released BD double features are any indication, these will be 50GB dual layer discs with the films encoded with the highly-adaptive VC-1 codec at roughly 20GB file size per film.

Each sequel aside from New Nightmare hovers around ninety minutes in duration and that's nothing compared to the 247 minutes of their BD pairing of Presumed InnocentandFrantic (screenshots here). As you can see, both of those films "crammed" onto one Blu-ray look more than just fine. Hopefully the Elm Street sequels can at least look as good, but don't fool yourself, any quality difference between placing these on separate discs or two-per-disc would be negligible to non-existent. I also imagine many of those complaining the most loudly probably believe Arrow Video's frequently poor Blu-ray output to be horror-heaven sent.

To further prove my point, the main feature size of Warner's absolutely stunning A Nightmare on Elm Street transfer is only 23GB. On top of all this, encode the standard definition supplements for the sequels in VC-1 to save even more file space and there's nothing to worry about in terms of disc capacity. On the other hand, the real threat is digital noise reduction which Craven's original exhibited none of on the format. If Warner avoids that temptation and doesn't use ancient masters (HD broadcasts of the sequels look quite solid), we'll be in for a treat once these are all out and many will be eating crow...